The sight of London’s Muslim mayor celebrating the transformation of a crown jewel of the Anglican estate into a semi-secular setting, and doing so while reducing a venerated place of English Christian worship to the status of a landmark, felt like a provocation to some. Taking up Khan’s challenge, the journalist Tom Harwood proposed: “Heaven nightclub. Baitul Futuh Mosque,” referencing a prominent gay nightspot and a south London masjid.
The mayor’s disregard for England’s Christian heritage notwithstanding, the Fabric collaboration comes at a time of profound tribulation for Anglicanism. The denomination has been the established church in England continuously since the seventeenth century, but its origins stretch back to the Reformation. Its (temporal) head is King Charles III, and its bishops sit in the House of Lords, but its nominal flock, the English, are a thoroughly irreligious lot. Just 5 percent of British adults attend church weekly, a figure that rises to a mere 13 percent for professed Christians. The collapse in formal worship in the United States in recent years might leave American clergy despairing, but their English brethren would consider such numbers a gift from the Almighty. The sunset of English religiosity is by no means only an Anglican phenomenon, as a glimpse at a typical Sunday Mass in England’s Catholic churches will attest. Only Islam is experiencing growth in Blighty.
The emptying of the pews has coincided with a hollowing out of the church in other senses. Between 2010 and 2019, 423 Anglican churches closed their doors permanently. The Church of England’s website advertises shuttered churches for lease or sale. There are currently forty-one listed. Amid widespread reports of overstretched and underpaid vicars, forced by a decline in vocations to minister to an ever-growing number of parishes, our friend Rev. Walker recently warned the church was “on a path to annihilation,” noting a 20 percent drop in paid clergy since the turn of the century. The Labour government hardly eased the financial pressure when it announced that grants from a £23 million per annum church restoration fund would now be liable for 20 percent value-added tax.
The Church of England benefits from an £11.6 billion endowment fund, but parishes see precious little of it. Commercial ventures like concert-hosting might seem benign enough as money-spinning schemes go, but whether it’s raves in the naves or Fiona Apple by the lady chapel, there is a risk that by welcoming in the secular, England’s cathedrals and churches are letting some of the sacred escape. A Christian house of worship offers the pilgrim something no secular space can: the chance to encounter the Divine within a monument to his majesty. Step over the threshold to a church, and you are instantly aware of having left behind the worldly and ventured into the spiritual. Nothing that diminishes this experience is worth any financial reward.
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